And they succeed, and the family is reunited and there is much rejoicing. In the 80's, attempting to cash in on the popularity of the Ewoks, Lucasfilm produced a made for TV movie called The Ewok Adventure, about a family crash-landing on Endor, Mom and Dad are captured by a giant troll and the kids enlist the ewoks to rescue their parents. The ending of one story is the prologue to the next story. The curious thing is that the real world doesn't work this way. Whether our game-stories are single-installment stories or multi-chapter stories, there's the expectation of an ending and ideally an exciting one. Other kinds of stories span a long period of time, specifically in the Civ game genre ( Civilization, Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization, etc.), albeit with the weird contrivance that we, the players, represent the same entity over that entire time. Other examples include chapter-based games like Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger or The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game. The game analogy to this is the Legacy game - SeaFall or Charterstone or, well, Betrayal Legacy - where each session of the game uncovers a bit more of the overall story. But these are basically one long story, with the additional expectation that each individual installment has a self-contained ending. We're all familiar with the Star Wars trilogy or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and maybe some of are familiar with the Wheel of Time.err, monstrosity. Now some stories take multiple installments to tell. Which, of course, is highly congruent with our ongoing kick about prior knowledge. The games that were once jokingly called "Ameritrash" are now sort-of called "thematic games", which encompasses dungeon crawlers like Gloomhaven, app-assisted games like Forgotten Waters, storybook-enhanced games like Stuffed Fables, Tales of the Arabian Nights and Sleeping Gods, "trope-assemblers" like Betrayal at House on the Hill, and many more.ĭan wrote up a nice survey of narrative game design and how games like Vast, Rocky Mountain Man, and Sleeping Gods use familiar associations and progression to give the feeling of emergent narratives that engage players. This is part of the ongoing conversation about how games share qualities with stories, and so it's no surprise to see that many games have tried to capture in cardboard these richer story-based experiences. The last post talked about how memories and stories function differently, and how a game is more likely to produce memorable moments out of which great gaming stories are borne if the game itself produces fun in-game stories.
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